If you have a an app idea you want to develop you don’t need to be a computer programmer or a highly skilled user to make it real. Nowadays there is a huge amount of available developers to choose from and you can hire one from overseas or a local one.

I live in Melbourne, Australia. And here the costs of developing an app can be high when you are working with app developers melbourne based. Yo can expect to pay anywhere from $80 to $150 per hour to a local and the truth is that sometimes depending on the complexity of your app is much more cost effective to get it done overseas at a fraction of what you would be paying to the local.

But with the cheaper costs of outsourcing your development to an overseas programmer also comes some risks and problems you may not be considering. When you outsource work overseas you need to account for timezone differences which will make communications and progression of development harder. Its a common mistake for people that had outsourced their development to an overseas person to just compare hourly costs and assume they will get the same thing but cheaper.

When you hire an overseas developer you are dealing with a person that probably has more ongoing projects and its not putting his 100% in your app as you would want or expect, after all you are paying him a fraction of what you would be paying for app development to a local and he needs more projects to make his income whole. This means that for him your app is just another project to be completed asap so he can get on with the next one, this plus the fact that he has never met you in person makes hard for him to create an emotional connection with your app, and lets face it, we all want to get special treatment.

On other side one of the advantages of hiring a local developer on a full time basis for your project is that you get personal meetings where you will be able to express exactly what you want to him and get him motivated and fully engaged with your project. At least in my experience most app developers melbourne based are passionate about their work, this means that an app project for them is much more than just a bunch of code to be completed in exchange for money. A local developer will get involved and emotionally attached to your app, he may even bring new ideas for features you haven’t think of before.

When you are working with an overseas developer the reaction time for changes, requests or enquiries is slow and can get to a point that is frustrating because a discussion about some feature or changes in your app can take hours and even days going back and forth over emails. When you work with a local you can just meet with him and resolve issues or communicate changes to him in little time and much more easily.

In the end the big difference and main reason to choose an overseas developer is the cost, but sometimes you can end up with higher costs fixing or redoing things in your app because of poor quality code or because you simply could not effectively communicate what you wanted and how you wanted it to a person that is thousands of miles away.

What you need to know before making this decision is how complex your app features are and what you want in your potential developer. For example not every app needs constant talks and feedback to be able to move forward, but some projects do and can mean the failure of it if your developer is really hard to reach.

Take the time to assess and identify the exact profile of developer your specific app project needs and you will save valuable time and resources in the future.